Episode 37: We discuss the latest Apple ongoings along with a breakdown of each of our go-to accessories for our iOS devices.
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Let’s Talk iOS 037: Our favorite accessories
iPhone News
Apple could fire longtime ad agency TBWA, look to Beats’ Jimmy Iovine to regain marketing mojo
Gossip along Madison Avenue is growing more fluent about Apple tiring of its longtime ad agency TBWA Media Labs over a series of disappointing ads. The client-agency relationship is said to have deteriorated to the point where the iPhone maker ostensibly appears on the brink of putting its ad account up for a formal review and firing the ad agency after 30 years of fruitful collaboration.
The rumor arrives just as Apple has found itself under fire from Samsung, which aired the snarky 'Wall Huggers' ad last week to paint the iPhone users as mindless zombies who huddle around power outlets trying to charge up their devices.
The New York Post asserted Monday, without mentioning sources, that Apple and TBWA are at the break-up point. TBWA is a unit of Omnicom Group, the world's largest advertising agency holding company. Apple, the story goes, also appears ready to look to music mogul Jimmy Iovine, now an Apple employee following the $3 billion Beats buy, to help it "regain its marketing mojo"...
CCSliders: an all-in-one slider for Control Center
Ever since the iOS 7 jailbreak was released, there has been no shortage of tweaks for Control Center. Nonetheless, there's always room for more refinements to iOS 7's quick settings panel. CCSliders isn't a new tweak, but, for the most part, it has remained tucked away in a third-party repo without a lot of attention. That is, until now.
CCSliders allows users to tap on icons to the left or right of the brightness slider in Control Center to cycle through several other types of sliders, including media volume, ringer volume, and flashlight brightness. There's even an add-on for a f.lux slider in the same repo. CCSliders is simple in concept, but it adds unique and handy functionality to iOS 7's Control Center...
5 calculator apps Apple featured in App Store’s Productivity Monday section
To me, calculator apps are a lot like weather apps - I can never get enough of them. In an effort to help you increase your mobile productivity, Apple is now featuring several great third-party calculators in an App Store section titled Productivity Monday.
Featured iPhone and iPad software includes both paid and free calculators, including the gorgeously designed minimalist Digits app with the ability to edit complex calculations and get instantly updated results...
Poll: what’s more important to you – screen size or battery life?
Pundits and fans are in agreement that a bigger screen will be the #1 selling point of Apple's forthcoming iPhone 6 refresh. With two models in tow, one with a 4.7-inch screen and the other using a phablet-class 5.5-inch display, the iconic smartphone will for the first time go comfortably past four inches.
So, who's willing to trade a bigger screen for a much-improved battery that could keep you going for 24 hours or more, on a single charge? For the sake of completeness, One survey identified a longer-lasting battery as the top feature request by early iPhone 5 adopters ahead of the handset's September 2012 launch...
SwipeExpander: a new keyboard shortcut tool for jailbreakers
SwipeExpander is a new jailbreak tweak that brings powerful keyboard shortcut gestures to the iPhone à la AltKeyboard. The tweak employs swipe-up and swipe-down keyboard gestures to invoke a variety of different actions, from mundane copy/paste shortcuts, to insert text shortcuts.
One of the cool things about SwipeExpander is that lowercase and uppercase keys are deemed separate, meaning you can have a large variety of keyboard gestures across the 26 letters in the english alphabet. But that's not all, SwipeExpander plays nice with well-known and respected keyboard related tweaks like SwipeSelection, PredictiveKeyboard, and more. Check out our hands-on video inside.
Dropbox introduces Streaming Sync with up to 2x faster syncing of large files
Heavy Dropbox users may have noticed that large files sixteen megabytes in size and up won't start downloading to their other devices until they've finished uploading fully to the Dropbox cloud on the device which has initiated sync.
A new Dropbox technology dubbed Streaming Sync promises to speed up sync times of large files by up to two times, by downloading small slices of a large file as it's still being uploaded to the servers.
Before you can start taking advantage of this technology, you must update your desktop Dropbox client to the latest version...
Rumor: Apple’s secret partnership with Intelligent Energy to boost iPhone battery performance
Rumor has it that Apple has secretly partnered with a British fuel-cell firm called Intelligent Energy on deploying its fuel cells in electronic devices such as MacBooks, iPhones and iPads within a few years.
Intelligent Energy's technology converts chemical energy from fuel stored in the cells into electricity.
The technology could potentially allow future iPhones and iPads to run on a single charge for days or even weeks. As a bonus, the process is green and highly efficient...
iCloud Mail down for a small number of users for 17 hours now
If you use iCloud Mail, you may have noticed by now that your emails are not arriving, or are having difficulties accessing the web interface or your account in Apple's stock iOS Mail app and third-party email clients.
If so, you're among a tiny 0.1 percent of users who've been unable to receive mail for 20 hours and counting, according to Apple's iCloud dashboard on the web...
Google launches augmented reality game Ingress on iOS
The Internet giant Google earlier in the year ported its near-real time augmented reality massively multiplayer online pervasive game, Ingress, to Android and now the app is available on iOS as well.
The free iPhone and iPad game uses your location and real-world objects in your near vicinity to provide various clues and transform your world into the landscape for a "global game of mystery, intrigue, and competition"...
Noted analyst claims 5.5-inch iPhone 6 could delay until 2015 over production woes
In his new research note issued to clients Monday, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo cautions that Apple's 5.5-inch iPhone 6 could be delayed until after October and possibly until 2015, over yield issues with its in-cell touch panel and metal casing.
According to the analyst, panels this large exhibit issues where the edge of the panel may become insensitive to touch. Also, under Apple's new manufacturing process for the iPhone 6 metal casing, "color unevenness is an issue," wrote Kuo...
Saurik on competition and community
Every once in a while, a group of individuals surfaces to offer a new "Cydia alternative." Full of good intentions, these individuals usually realize quickly enough that building a replacement or even a complement to Cydia isn't an easy task.
The latest Cydia alternative to generate interest within the community is iMods, an elegant installer that doesn't necessarily aim to take on Cydia, but rather target a different user base, as one of its developer explains. The concept, both in terms of design and engineering sounds promising, but is it viable?
Does it even make sense to try to bring a new installer to market? What does it take to do so, and what hurdles should the developers of such a tool be ready to face? These are some questions that Saurik tries to answer in a 5,600 word essay...